The GM Hydramatic transmission had been around for 13 years in 1953, but still seemed futuristic.

December 29, 2016

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The General Motors Hydramatic was the first really successful automatic transmission, available starting with Oldsmobiles for the 1940 model year. Much as many of us disapprove of automatic transmissions as a matter of principle, the Hydramatic and all its successors were regarded as quite futuristic around the middle 20th century.

In 1953, Memphis bluesman Joe Hill Louis recorded an early rock-n-roll song called "Hydramatic Woman." Other than references to the transmission as something that makes a car fast, the lyrics of this song don't go into specifics of what made the Hydramatic so good. The fact that the Hydramatic was used as a superlative to describe an attractive woman, however, indicates the high esteem in which many held GM's slushbox in mid-20th-century America.